tag:www.rogerebert.com,2005:/blogs/feedAll Content2017-08-17T19:19:55-05:00tag:www.rogerebert.com,2005:BlogPost/599619bf63d37d37b50000832017-08-17T19:19:55-05:002017-08-17T19:20:20-05:00The Third Course: Michael Winterbottom on "The Trip to Spain"Nell Minow

Michael Winterbottom blurs the line between reality and fiction in his “Trip” series, with Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan traveling through magnificent scenery, enjoying gorgeously prepared food, and needling each other, not always gently, about their talent and professional accomplishments. Brydon and Coogan use their own names and refer to real projects (in this third film, “The Trip to Spain,” they both have things to say about “Philomena”). But many of the details of their lives are changed and the other characters, including family members, are played by actors. In an interview with RogerEbert.com, Winterbottom talked about the lines between fiction and non-fiction and comedy and tragedy, why he doesn’t like jokes, and his favorite of his stars’ impressions.

If you are going to change so many details of their lives, why use their real names?

I love films that play with or switch the versions of real events and real people. In this case it’s probably just simplicity of continuing what we’ve done before. It just felt like it kind of came out of their conversations. They had conversations about their career, about families, about their different views of the world and it just felt like it would be much richer and simpler if they were expressing those as themselves rather than trying to create a kind of character that explains who they are. We thought that it would be much freer, and funnier and actually engaging as well, playing the variations of themselves. I think it’s what a lot of comedians do anyway. With stand-up comedians there’s a big overlap between who they are really and the character they portray onstage. They’re talking and being funny and exaggerating but it overlaps very closely who they are.

Brydon and Coogan are very funny, as always, but there is a melancholy overlay to the film. Why do you include some sad and scary scenes in what is essentially a comedy?

The melancholy is just coming from two people at 50 who’re suddenly talking about 50 being a prime year but aware of getting older. I think they are talking quite honestly about their careers, their family and their hopes and in a way that hopefully people can recognize there’s always a slight melancholy to that once you get beyond a certain point.

That may be why they seem to be more comfortable in this one.

[Laughs] I’m not sure that it shows on screen but definitely making it was probably the most enjoyable in terms of their relationship. It is so tricky. The idea in the fiction that they have these different views of the world and that can be a conflict. In the real world they genuinely have their different views of the world but they’re not really in conflict. They recognize that both perspectives are necessary. Because what they’re saying actually overlaps quite closely to what they believe, that can be quite an interesting area when they move away from the lunch table then what bits hang over. It was definitely enjoyable to make so I hope it’s enjoyable to watch.

The food all looks so luscious. I love the shots in the kitchen with the sizzling pans and dots of sauce on the plates. Did you get to try it all?

For me the food part of the trip is before we start filming. We did our driving and eating then, especially in Spain, where we required a lot of routes and journeys because we were not sure exactly which way we would go. So we had a lot of great food in the pre-production. Unfortunately we’re filming while they’re eating so there’s often the sad sight of the crew and even me at the end of a meal and diving in and eating the scraps.

The film is so intimate and natural. I wondered how big your crew was and where you all were?

We have a very small crew. We started with only two cameras and we now sometimes have three. We try to keep the restaurant open so the kitchen is running as normal. They are told to behave as normal, which they really do, and we try and be discreet and keep out of their way. We bring actors into public spaces with ordinary people and we don’t try to control the other people.

Coogan and Brydon are becoming a pair in the tradition of great movie comedy duos like Hope and Crosby.

I’ve worked with Steve quite a few times over the last 15 years. He is very intelligent and he has a lot of energy, a lot of strong views about the world. He wants to be serious as well as funny. Rob is just as quick, very, very quick, great improviser. He likes to pick up on ideas and play with them. He says he’s just trying to be funny and enjoy life and he’s happy in his family. They have to do hours and hours of hard work to sustain just the shooting of it let alone the watching of it and I think what helps them is they are very similar; they share a lot of cultural references and social interests but they have very different attitudes towards life. So the whole idea is keep playing around with different topics and two different attitudes and I think that allows them to keep the energy up.

I read that you don’t like jokes.

Rob says that as a complaint but I take it from Steve as a compliment. I don’t like the construction of a joke where you can see what’s coming. I’m a huge fan of Woody Allen movies, the mid-'70s films. He shows how things can be really funny without having to construct the film around a joke. Steve is much keener to inhabit the character, be honest about the character, be passionate about the character; genuinely wanting to explain about social issues or influences. Rob’s natural inclination is that as Steve is being serious and compassionate, Rob will try to find a way of making that funny.

I’m going to ask you a really difficult question; who does the best Michael Caine?

They’re both very good so I’m not getting into trouble by picking one.

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tag:www.rogerebert.com,2005:BlogPost/5995192f297ed304f30000282017-08-17T09:38:00-05:002017-08-17T10:47:20-05:00Jeanne Moreau and the Art of RefusalChristina Newland

The first word I think of to describe the aura of Jeanne Moreau isn’t a word at all: Unfuckwithable. I feel certain the French probably have a more elegant phrase for it, but the thrust of the idea is this: Moreau’s unique screen alchemy defies conventional adjectives. Her star power had a combination of reserve and ferocity to it, an intellect that aided and abetted her raw physicality, a melancholy that ensconced her even while singing or dancing. It made her as powerful and self-contained as a fire borne of spontaneous combustion.

By comparison to her contemporaries, Moreau found screen stardom relatively late in life. She was already an established theatre actress at the renowned Comédie-Française before she began acting in films, and even then it was a few years before she crossed paths with young director Louis Malle. She was 30 when she gave that first immortal performance in Louis Malle’s “Elevator to the Gallows,” wandering the Parisian streets inconsolably to a percussive, lachrymose jazz score provided by Miles Davis.

She would go on to work with what was essentially a who’s who of French New Wave directors and arthouse film intelligentsia. She even fit several Orson Welles films in between her European ventures (“The Trial,” “Chimes at Midnight” and “The Immortal Story”), inspiring him to say she was "the greatest actress in the world."

Moreau was a mercurial romantic in “Jules et Jim,” a lightning rod of righteous vengeance in “The Bride Wore Black,” and practically a human molotov cocktail in "Mademoiselle." She shatters bourgeois values in “Diary of a Chambermaid,” giggles her way through an anti-imperialist comedy schtick in “Viva Maria!,” and always draws all the attention and air from the room she walks into. She’s breathtaking.

What first struck me about Moreau wasn’t actually her embodiment of unique traits; it was her lack of the ones that I’d always seen, to some extent, in other female screen stars. She was never girlish or coy; she was mature and womanly. Even at her most daffy and spritely—as Catherine in “Jules et Jim,” for example—she always seemed grounded by something. She was more in the vein of an earthy, elemental, Italian actress like Anna Magnani than with other French cinema stars of the period.

Moreau wasn’t the sort of empty-vessel cipher presented by Anna Karina in much of Jean-Luc Godard’s work—or a sex goddess avatar like Brigitte Bardot. She was overtly sensual, and even sometimes an archetypal object of male lust, but she never seemed to belong to anyone but herself. Even when men left her, spurned her, or cast her aside, she seemed complete.

In many ways, Moreau’s film career was still defined by men and the popular auteurism that ruled the ‘60s and ‘70s. She worked with only two women directors throughout her entire career—once with novelist Marguerite Duras in 1972’s “Nathalie Granger,” and decades later, in 2001, playing Duras in “Cet amour la” for her friend and director Josée Dayan. Dayan and Moreau worked together twice more before Moreau’s death, but none of the actresses’ collaborations with women garnered anything like the sort of fame her earlier auteur-led projects did. In her life, she was averse to "joining" any group with a party line, including the women’s movement. But she was also keen to try her hand at directing, making two feature films in the 1970’s and a television documentary on silent film doyenne Lillian Gish. I’ve yet to see them, but they promise an unfaltering ambition and curiosity about the craft of filmmaking.

In the liminal space she occupies, it may seem an odd contention to champion Jeanne Moreau as some kind of proto-feminist heroine. But her stardom has never been concretely political or wholly "empowering" in that sense. Instead, her screen presence is fluid and primal. It’s a combination of knowing, wise femininity and comfort in the power one can wield with it. She is unfazed, defiant, and self-assured in a way that absolutely compelled me as a young film student.

For me, there was always something about Moreau. During the male-dominated, canon-heavy curriculum I and so many other film students spent our formative years absorbing, she stood out to me like nearly no other film actress did. She was sexually confident instead of performatively sexual, personifying elegant refusal rather than petulant rebellion. She made me want to be a grown-up woman rather than a youthful girl; to embrace the half-moons under my eyes and blow Gauloise smoke from my world-weary lips. As Patti Smith admiringly points out, it’s Jeanne Moreau who inspired her to “think girl stuff is where it’s at.”

After watching Moreau’s films, the musician concluded, “When I’m about 35, I’m going to start wearing black cocktail dresses and become a real c***.” Smith is making a very specific point in using that nasty, oft-misogynistic word. She cheerfully refers to herself—and by extension, to Jeanne Moreau—with it. But Moreau exemplifies those things that men resent, the traits that can put a woman on the receiving end of such a mortifying insult: she’s mature, powerful, and—yes—unfuckwithable.

Moreau always seemed to operate outside of the realm of male control, in spite of working with a glut of male film directors. And she was utterly disinterested in sentimentality, both onscreen and off. In real life, she detested nostalgia, brushed off star-gazing interviewers, and adamantly set the record straight. On-screen, she had portrayed women who walked away from their children or husbands without a second glance (“Les Amants,” 1958) or turned psychotically on their lovers (“Mademoiselle,” 1966). For Patti Smith—and for me, too—Jeanne Moreau personified the art of refusal, even at its most brusque and unlikeable. In that way, she was revolutionary.

The odds seem stacked in "Logan Lucky"'s favor the instant you spot "Directed by Steven Soderbergh" in the opening credits. Sure enough, it's a winner. Soderbergh is one of the reigning masters of the heist picture: he did the "Ocean's Eleven" remake and its two sequels, plus "Out of Sight" and "The Underneath." This one's about a bunch of good ol’ boys trying to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway in West Virginia, but the vibe is so similar to Soderbergh's hit heist trilogy that a TV newscaster fesses up by describing the gang in this one as "Ocean's 7-Eleven." The movie is put together with the no-fuss confidence of Soderbergh's best entertainments, staging comedic banter and suspense sequences with equal assurance, even playing sly perception games with the audience by making you wonder how smart or dumb the characters (and the movie) actually are.

The story centers on two brothers, both wounded war veterans. Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum), a onetime coal miner, lost a leg in the service. Jimmy’s younger brother Clyde (Adam Driver) lost part of an arm, and now tends bar at a roadside saloon where Jimmy is a regular. An obnoxious customer jokes that if you put the Logan boys together, you’d get a whole person. That's not too far off the mark: like redneck cousins of George Clooney and Brad Pitt's characters in the "Ocean's" movies, they amplify each other's better qualities, and maintain a united front even they disagree. Legend has it that the Logan family, which also includes a badass, hot-car-driving kid sister named Mellie (Riley Keough), is cursed. Throughout "Logan Lucky," you keep wondering if the curse will rear its head and ruin the plan Jimmy has cooked up with Clyde and a third partner, an imprisoned explosives expert named Joe Bang (Daniel Craig) who's five months away from release.

It’s a heck of a scheme. Seems the Charlotte Motor Speedway has a sinkhole problem, and Jimmy was part of the team of ex-coal miners brought in to fix it. While toiling beneath the stadium, he learned that concession stand earnings are delivered to a cash vault deep in the basement by way of pneumatic tubes. The Logans promise that with a little help from Joe they can break into the vault, steal the cash, and walk away rich. Joe says he’d be happy to join the team if he weren’t, as he sneers, "In...CAR...cer...a...TED." No biggie. The Logan boys offer to bust Joe out of prison long enough to join the heist, then sneak him back in.

At this point you may start to wonder how smart the Logans actually are and how seriously we're supposed to take their boasting. There are two kinds of people who make promises like the ones the Logans make to Joe Bang: hotshots and idiots. The characters in this film are drawn with broad enough strokes that they could go either way. The Logans and the Bangs—including Joe's younger brothers, Sam and Fish (Brian Gleeson and Jack Quaid), one of whom claims to be a computer expert who knows "all the Twitters"—are a loquacious bunch of misfits and scalawags, nervy as hell. But sometimes they sound like characters from one of those Coen brothers movies filled with dimwitted braggarts—think "Raising Arizona" or "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"—and each one has a different accent. Driver sounds like Forrest Gump eating peanut butter, Craig has the barbecued hambone drawl of a sheriff from a 1970s hicksploitation picture, and there are times when Tatum seems to forget to have one. Only Keough, the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, seems as rooted in life as the screenplay's references to NASCAR fandom, the child beauty pageant circuit, contaminated groundwater, and the fall of the mining industry.

You may also wonder if this is the kind of film that believes in curses. Some films do, some don't, and others leave you guessing. There are no curses in "The Sting" or "Ocean’s Eleven," but characters in Coen Bros. films often do seem cursed, not just by their own overconfidence or stupidity, but by coincidence, misunderstanding or fate. Things go well enough early on in "Lucky Logan" that you start wondering about the movie's point of view on destiny, bad mojo, and the like. Is the movie's title sincere, ironic, or neither?

All questions are answered in due time. The screenplay is credited to Rebecca Blunt, supposedly a young first-timer getting her big break, but it’s an open secret that it was really written by Soderbergh’s wife Jules Asner, who hails from West Virginia. She partly based Jimmy, a faded high school football star, on Channing Tatum, who grew up poor in Alabama, Mississippi and Florida, and was headed for a college football scholarship until he wrecked his knee and turned to stripping and modeling instead (see the Tatum/Soderbergh "Magic Mike" collaborations).

Soderbergh directed the script (and edited and shot it under pseudonyms—a Soderbergh family tradition, it seems) with his characteristic smoothness, moving through the story so deftly that you don't realize you've already gone from point A to point B until you're already en route to point C. There’s no wasted motion. Everything happens as it does for a reason. There are points where you might assume that the film is rushing through incidents that it can’t adequately explain or justify, or just flat-out forgetting to give details that would make a character’s actions make sense. But that proves not to be the case. The film gives out information on a need-to-know basis: if you don’t need it, you won’t know it.

This need-to-know aesthetic carries all the way down to the level of individual shots. Soderbergh's camera is constantly framing scenes and moving through space in order to conceal or reveal information about the characters' motives and the progress of the heist. Some shots are structured like well-wrought jokes—one where you think you know where the story is headed, then laugh out loud when it takes you someplace else. A lot of times you have no idea what you're looking at or why it's important until Soderbergh moves a bit to the left or shifts focus to make you go, "Aha!" There are few working directors who still know how to make a film this way. Soderbergh is one of them.

"Logan Lucky" is not a deep or particularly original film and isn't trying to be, and there are moments when you might wish that it had taken an extra scene or beat to flesh out its oddball characters and give them more than two dimensions (though there are moments—the one set at a school recital, in particular—that do exactly that). And a couple of characters who are introduced with great fanfare (notably a clinic worker played by Katherine Waterston, and an FBI agent played by Hilary Swank who snarls like Clint Eastwood) don't make as much of an impression as they should. But it's precision-tooled entertainment made by experts, and sometimes more than that. Watchingit is like finding money in the pocket of a coat that you haven’t worn in years.

Geremy Jasper wrote and directed “Patti Cake$,” the story of a New Jersey white girl who dreams of being a rapper. Australian actor Danielle MacDonald is heartbreaking, hilarious, and fearless as Patti, who performs under the name “Killer P.” In an interview with RogerEbert.com, Jasper and MacDonald talked about Jasper’s New Jersey roots, role-playing in Times Square, and the acting advice MacDonald got from Oscar-winner Frances McDormand.

What does it take to be a good rapper?

GEREMY JASPER: I don’t know if I can answer that question. I think it takes an original style and an original flow, a good sense of rhythm obviously and some personality and an interesting world view.

Was the New Jersey accent a tough challenge for an Aussie actress?

DANIELLE MACDONALD: It took lot of practice. I had an amazing dialect coach named Tim Monich and he basically started me off with some recordings of these women from New Jersey just talking about their lives. I listened to them over and over again religiously to a point where I pretty much memorized their life stories. He helped me with all the technical things, basically words that I had never heard before, I had no idea to how say. He would help me with the general rules of the Jersey dialect. Geremy was rewriting lyrics throughout the process of filming so sometimes I would get a new lyric and I’d be like, “I've never this word before,” so I would email him at 2 AM and he would send back a voice recording instantly of him saying it with the Jersey accent which was beyond helpful. Yeah, mostly just about finding the placement in my mouth where the Jersey accent lived to kind of feel comfortable with it and just getting used to hearing the style so that it sounded natural to me.

There are a lot of words I didn’t know in the raps, in a way just kind of references to things that I had never heard before maybe because I grew up in Australia and some things were definitely just New Jersey-specific lingo. And for some reason I struggled with the word Episcopalian, I really did. When we were on set Geremy was like “that just doesn’t sound right” and I was like “I don’t know how to make it sound right.”

GJ: It took maybe 25 takes.

Your character has to really subdue her personality to take a job as a cater waitress, but you showed us some simmering under the surface.

DM: I know who this character is, now this is the character trying to be the ideal employee; someone that she is not and just taking on an insult like “okay I’m going to smile through it and just get through the day, make money, go home.”

GJ: I was really impressed that Danielle's ability to smile but have this look in her eyes that says “Eat shit.” I just love that combination.

DM: Well, that’s what I was thinking.

GJ: We’ve all been in that situation where we’ve worked with those guys before, at least I have.

How did you come up with Patti’s look?

GJ: That was probably the most difficult department head to fill. I interviewed maybe twenty different costume designers. We were waiting for Miyako Bellizzi, who ended up doing it, just waiting and waiting and waiting for her while she was doing “Good Time,” the Safdie brothers' film, right before. It was a really intense film to work on and she kept saying, “I just don't know if I can do it, I just don't know if I can do it.” I finally got her to read the script and she was like “okay I know this character.” Some people were interpreting Patti as very cartoony and bigger than life with big graphic t-shirts and it didn't feel right. You walk around New Jersey and go to the mall, you’ll see like 20 or 30 Pattis. I needed someone who could capture that real quality of a young woman, kind of just a townie but also put a little bit of flavor on it. It’s not over the top but she has a unique style. It's not like she’s going to walk around like she’s in a music video all day. Miyako was the perfect person for that because Miyako is kind of like that; Miyako is actually in the film, she’s O-Z’s girlfriend in the film.

DM: Once I actually went to that costume house and first started having fittings, that helped me so much find the character; oh, this is what she puts on in the morning, this is who she is, getting in the shoes, getting in the Tim’s and walking around in them; that helped me immensely because it helps you find another layer of the character. It was all clothes I had never worn before but I was like “I kind of feel cool wearing these,” and it’s amazing.

GJ: A big break I think for both Danielle and myself with Patti was we went into Times Square and I made Siddharth Dhananjay, who plays Jheri, in character as Jheri and Danielle as Patti go to this Timberland store and Jheri bought her some Tims with them bonding, Jheri kind of protecting Patti and spoiling her and like them looking at which pair she would buy. All that stuff really cemented a certain relationship. I could see it come to life in the film. And then once Danielle was wearing those Timberlands, it changed the way that she stood, it changed her body language, it changed the way she walked and suddenly it she started to feel like the women I grew up around so that was like the ruby slippers.

It was great to see Cathy Moriarty as Patti’s grandmother, Nana. She is terrific.

GJ: The script had many, many drafts. I probably had written about ten drafts and during those drafts there were a lot of different family members; her dad was involved at one point. We shot some scenes with her dad that got cut out. Patti was going to have a brother at one point. But Nana kind of grew. She wasn't really a part of the first maybe two drafts and then I started thinking about my grandmother Gussie on my dad's side, this really, really tough woman from Paterson, New Jersey. My grandfather ran a gas station and she used to pump gas in high heels, smoking cigarettes, no bra, telling dirty jokes and cursing. She was a real eccentric, interesting person who unfortunately had an alcohol problem. She was really warm and loving but very, very tough and had an acid tongue. So I grew up just hearing endless stories about this character and that's why my name starts with ‘G,’ because of Gussie. So I wanted to honor her memory and that went into the Nana character. I know the Barb character, Patti’s mother, very well; there are a lot of Barbs around town. I've been in relationships with women who’ve had mothers who are similar with that love and that rivalry and we’ve all seen that woman pouring her heart into a karaoke song at three o'clock in the morning at the local dive bar. I got very, very lucky in that Bridget Everett and Cathy Moriarty brought so much to those roles. When I was writing I felt they could be a little two-dimensional but they just made them whole hilarious characters.

Danielle, what’s the best advice you ever got about acting?

DM: I had a talk with Frances McDormand actually right before I did my first lead in a film and that was really amazing. I think I was just really scared, I’d never done a lead before and all of a sudden you kind of feel like a little bit of pressure and I’m like, “I don’t really know exactly what I'm doing.” She gave me this great talk and it was honestly just her giving her own first experience as a lead and she was very much calming me down, making me feel like whatever happens, happens and it's okay. That talk actually meant a lot because it gave me so much more confidence in my ability to just do it and not be scared of it.

“The Wound” is set in a remote rural community in South Africa, and is centered on a cultural ritual that will no doubt strike most outsiders as being barbaric. At the same time, however, it is also a film that deals with issues of masculinity, sexuality and community that will strike universal chords with viewers of all stripes, regardless of where they are from or where their beliefs may lie. The result is a dark and stirring variation on the standard coming-of-age narrative that, much like its central characters, does not follow the path one might expect.

The film is set within the Xhosa community of rural South Africa and takes place during the period of Ukwaluka, an annual rite of passage for young male teens to symbolize their move into adulthood. In it, the boys are taken up to the mountains where one of the elder tribesmen circumcises them one by one, imploring them to yell out “I’m a man!” while he makes the incision. The boys then spend the next couple of weeks out there fasting and having traditional notions of masculinity drummed into them while their wounds heal. (This ritual used to be a secret but after word of it began to leak out, most notably when Nelson Mandela made reference to it in his autobiography, it has become a topic of heated controversy amongst the community.)

Having undergone the ritual himself when he was a teenager, Xolani (Nakhane Toure), now a lonely warehouse worker in his mid-30s, returns every year to serve as one of the “caregivers” to one of the new boys, but his interest in the ritual is halfhearted at best. No, what brings him back is the opportunity to, however briefly, reestablish his sexual relationship with childhood friend and fellow caregiver Vija (Bongile Mantsai). Although Xolani dreams of the two of them running off together, Vija, who has a wife and family in town and projects a hyper-masculine pose to everyone, clearly does not feel the same way. It is clear that Vija regards him as a convenient tool for gratification and nothing more.

Xolani’s charge this year is Kwanda (Niza Jay Ncoyini), a young man who lives in Johannesburg with his mother, who has been brought there by his father, a tribesman made good, who fears that his son is “too soft.” Far more sophisticated than the other boys undergoing the ritual, Kwanda alienates his peers and elders alike with his diffident attitude and his piercing questions about why the Ukwaluka rite even exists at all. It doesn’t take Xolani too long to figure out that, in addition to everything else, Kwanda is also gay, just about the biggest no-no of all in this particular community. What makes this even trickier is that Kwanda not only realizes that Xolani is gay as well but has a fairly good idea of the true nature of his relationship with Vija. Before long, tensions begin to rise between the three with Xolani and Vija beginning to crack under the pressure of trying to be something that they aren’t and Kwanda, for all of his smarts, not realizing how much danger he is now in.

At first glance, a film like “The Wound” might seem fairly alien from a cultural standpoint to a lot of viewers—the mass circumcision sequence seen (and especially heard) in the early going will almost certainly horrify the majority of them in ways that infinitely more graphic scenes of carnage in conventional scare films could not even begin to approximate. As the film goes on, however, it begins to capture and examine in intriguing ways any number of universally held truths and fears, such as the shame one oftentimes feels as they force themselves to live a lie, and the sense of rage that those same people feel at those who have managed to stay true to themselves. As a result, a story that might have played out as an ordinary coming-of-age scenario is given a darker and more dramatic spin that leads the story into unexpected areas before arriving at a finale that is legitimately surprising while still coming across as the plausible end result of the events we have seen.

The screenplay, which was co-written by John Trengrove (also making his directorial debut), Thando Mgqolozana and Malusi Bengu, does have a couple of moments in which it hits the dramatic points that it wants to make just a little too hard—at one point, Kwanda tears into Xolani with “You want me to stand up and be a man but you can’t do it yourself” and later wonders “How can love destroy a nation?” However, those moments are few and far between, and, for the most part, it takes an intelligent look at the subject at hand without degenerating into pleas for tolerance straight out of the Screenwriters 101 handbook. Trengrove’s direction is strong and sure in the way that he captures both the rhythms of the Xhosa and the ways in which their increasingly outmoded ideas are crumbling all around them and he elicits powerful performances from his three lead actors as well.

A film befitting its title, “The Wound” is a rough and unsparing film that offers an unflinching look of how once-traditional notions of masculinity can grow increasingly toxic in the hands of those who cling to those outmoded ways rather than accept that things have changed. It is not a film with easy answers to the problems that it depicts and there are moments that may simply be too painful for some viewers to endure. However, those who are in the mood for something more challenging than the usual multiplex fare or even the typical art house offerings are likely to find it to be an ultimately rewarding experience.

The story behind “Good Time” goes that actor Robert Pattinson saw a still from “Heaven Knows What,” the 2015 film by fraternal director duo of Benny Safdie & Joshua Safdie, and knew that he had to work with them. The project that came from this possibly fatalistic proclamation is no mere star vehicle to appease one of the biggest actors working today, but a full-fledged immersion of Pattinson into the anxious cinematic world of the Safdies, where characters hustle through a very non-flashy New York, often fighting for their freedom among neon lighting and synth music cues fit for “The Running Man.”

In 2015, the Safdie brothers adapted Arielle Holmes’ memoir, Mad Love in New York City, about being homeless and reliant on drugs for “Heaven Knows What,” which provided an unflinching look at people who live so far outside the system they hardly exist. The Safdies apply that same brutal energy to the original story of “Good Time,” about a con man named Connie Nikas (Pattinson) who will do anything to get his developmentally-disabled brother Nick (Benny Safdie) out of prison after their bank robbery goes awry. Other lives, including that of a young woman played by breakout star Taliah Webster, "Heaven Knows What" co-star Buddy Duress, and "Captain Philips" Oscar-nominee Barkhad Abdi, are dragged into his impulse-driven scheme. Written by Ronald Bronstein and Benny, the film is a genre thriller about brotherhood that is very much a product of their intense collaborative process and also very much a part of 2017, in particular with how Pattinson’s Connie utilizes his whiteness when eluding the cops.

RogerEbert.com spoke with the Safdies about how they're incredibly and uniquely hands-on with their filmmaking process, the choice to have Benny play a character who is developmentally disabled, the real-life inspiration "Good Time" received from a co-star's experience in prison and more.

I’m curious about the chemical balance of your movies, where they’re very stressful, and your characters are very impulsive. How does that reflect how you like to make movies and how you guys like to be on set?

JOSHUA SAFDIE: I think specifically for this movie, we had a big budget but the script was longer than the movie is, and we had a very aggressive schedule. We were constantly having to race against time, and that element really did kind of bring that energy to the movie in a kind of microcosmic level. Rob likes to talk about how chaotic it was, but it wasn’t. It’s all about finding the pocket of calm while you’re in the middle of shooting, but there was an element of, a speed that we had to make this movie. We would tell certain independent filmmakers it was 36 days of shooting, and then you tell certain Hollywood filmmakers and they’re like, “Oh my god, how did you do that?”

BENNY SAFDIE: And I think it’s just a matter of the way we’re approaching, and the way that the set is functioning. We kept having to add people as we were moving along, because we didn’t want too many people in our crew because we wanted to maximize, we wanted everyone to maximize their potential. Do everything they could to make the movie. Because the one moment you have someone sitting around like, “what the fuck am I doing here?” that would breed resentment. We didn’t want that, we wanted to have everybody feel like they were really a part of it. So, you’re creating this mentality of almost a construction site, and everybody is building and working towards it. And then that bleeds into performances and it bleeds into locations, and we had permission for almost all of the locations. The street stuff we would of course mess around with, most of the locations we had permission with, but we wanted to feel like we didn’t. So we would approach them stylistically with how we would make it feel like we’re doing something interesting here. So for example when we’re running through the mall, we set it up like we were going to steal the shot. The detail offer to our location manager is like, “What are they doing? They can have whatever they want here. You could close it down, do this,” but we wanted to keep it open. So he just says, “OK, just don’t hit anybody.” And that then becomes the direction, like, “OK, run through this massive crowd of people, but don’t hit anybody.” You really then have to think, and you’re so aware of your body and everything, that if you hit somebody it’s gonna be bad. So you’re not even thinking about the presence of the cameras or anything else except yourself.

As collaborators then, how do you guys resolve differences or ideas on set?

JOSHUA: Argue.

BENNY: Not on set! Sometimes we argue on set. But not as much.

I’m curious as to how you keep that construction site idea going.

BENNY: It’s vibe-based. We’ll just kind of feel it out, I’ll see if Josh is just rolling with an actor, I’ll just let him go and I’ll talk to him personally and I’ll pull him aside. And I’m running boom, and I know that he can hear me, and I can pull the boom down and be like, “Hey, come here, I noticed something was going on in this scene.” And I would tell Joshua and he’d relay it to this certain actor. Or other times, he’ll see that I am vibing with somebody and it’s just a matter of playing it out, and eventually, it kind of becomes this open conversation which is really nice.

Benny, you running boom is an interesting dynamic to your collective creativity process. Not many directors or even director duos are so first-hand with sound. What dynamic do you think that provides?

BENNY: Well, the guy who I did sound with was so excited, he’s like, “Nobody ever cares about this.” He’s like, “Nobody ever cares about sound, but I have one of the directors who actually cares about what things will sound like, and if it didn’t sound good we’d re-do it.” But just from a performative standpoint, the boom operator is someone who is almost in a way just taken for granted. They’re really close to the actors and they’re in the scene, so you can take advantage of that. And so, I like, and I consider myself good at it, we’re not taking the boom operator out, we’re putting in somebody who I feel can do it.

JOSHUA: Often it’s an overlooked job on set because that person is the most intimate person on set with the actors. They’re usually the closest.

BENNY: And while I’m there I can see a lot of other things that aren’t necessarily right on camera, I’m seeing hands and seeing how the emotions are going on in a different perspective. So then I can talk to Josh, who’s really dealing a lot with the camera. He has an ear piece.

JOSHUA: I have a direct, constant communication with the DP.

BENNY: “Go down to the hands, go down to the eyes.” How does it look? How does it feel? We can literally put the two things together.

You’ve found a way to get hands on even in the most intimate moments, where it’s much more than just your constant, claustrophobic close-ups. How many different cameras are you using when you’re filming different scenes?

JOSHUA: Sometimes it’s two cameras.

BENNY: We thought we’d do more.

JOSHUA: We thought for the sake of speed that we’d do more than two camera set-ups, and we found that it actually slowed us down to do two cameras. You end up hindering yourself in a lot of other ways. But the B camera operator, Chris Messina, is a great DP in his own right, and he’s an old friend of ours. So what we ended up doing is we would have two units. So there’d be A camera and B camera, and B cam, in order to maximize our time, we’d actually have B camera go set-up for the next scene, on a location, so that we could basically never stop, we’re shooting. We could shoot a scene, we don’t have to go stop and wait for a set-up, they’re setting up while we’re doing this other thing. It was very helpful, unless it’s whenever we were doing, when we’re in one location you can’t have a separate camera, but we would always have, “Alright, next shot is going to be on the 200m, let’s get that prepped” and then the 200m just gets walked in and Sean can shoot with that. Or literally, B cam will be shooting in Adventureland, and there would be a B unit getting shots of the rides. Benny would go, with an actor coming in, I wasn’t even present for when Rob goes in and turns on all of the rides inside the little hut. I was shooting something with Taliah.

BENNY: Literally to turn on all the rides in the park takes two hours.

JOSHUA: So that’s when having two directors is helpful, yeah.

BENNY: Because each ride is turned on individually. We had to literally have someone go around with each ride like, “OK, turn on ride A” or whatever and we’d get the shot. So we’d give the illusion that you’d just flip a switch. But that was an insane, that shoot was probably the hardest, because it was so cold and overnight and into the daytime. I remember there was this one time where literally we were so afraid that the light was going to come up. It was like, “Keep pushing!” It was the first time I ever looked at the lows of a forecast.

JOSHUA: No, the most fucked up thing is that anyone who shoots nights has to worry about the light coming up. That’s the same thing as the sun going down. But we would start during the day time, and we would do a split, where we’re already shooting basically shooting half a day’s worth of filming while it’s light out, and we’re chasing the sun. And then it’s like, “OK, the sun went down, let’s break for lunch.” And then we would shoot the entire night, and then the sun would come up, and then it was like, “I guess we’ll start shooting some of the stuff we missed from the daytime.” It was really intense.

With these movies, there’s an element that you guys love this city and you love these locations, but you're not using very large or specific NYC places either. Your films would make for one hell of an alternative NYC film tour. And it almost seems like people are trying to survive in the city. Do you guys love NYC but also want people to experience it as thunderdome?

JOSHUA: “Running Man” is … dystopia … look, we’re living in a dystopian time right now. Every day I wake up and there’s something more horrific crazy thing, or some photos that we see. There’s a website that I go to occasionally that my DP turned me onto that’s literally the most horrific, entropic place I’ve been to in my life. And I don’t even want to say the name because I don’t think anyone should experience this website.

Why do you go to that website?

JOSHUA: Because it’s human nature. I go there because it’s there, you know what I mean? And I hate myself when I’m there, because it’s so fucked up and horrific, and these videos that I watch are just so ugly and messed up. And it’s almost like, for a long time I would never want to see any of this stuff, and then Sean was always like, “No, you can’t avert your eyes, you need to see this stuff.” So for like the car crash scene, he was like, “We need to watch so many videos of cars.” And he was like, “Let’s shoot it from this place of a little bit behind it, but looking down on it.”

And we really kind of, I’m really interested in regional culture. If you want to know what a city is, you have to look at it as A.) it’s people, and the things, the regional lens of it. Because you’re not going to understand really, like there was a movie that I was excited about seeing, by a great filmmaker, “Shame.” Fassbender is amazing in it, and McQueen’s an amazing filmmaker, but that movie, there’s great scenes in it, but for the most part it really sticks to a hotel and like kind of an area that we’ve seen a million times, and it ends up not feeling like it’s anywhere. If you can get into the regional landmarks and the personal landmarks of somebody, “where does that person go everyday, why do they go here?” all the sudden you start to understand what the city is. Because the best way to understand the city is to work in one.

BENNY: And I think that some of the best compliments that we have gotten about that aspect of it is the fact that someone says, “I can imagine this being part of a city in Colombia, or a city in Mexico.” There’s an urban feeling to it, and this feeling of moving through a place that’s been lived in, and that just comes from the fact that yeah, we do live in New York City and we’re looking at it from the sidewalk’s point-of-view. We’re not looking at it with our heads up at the skyscrapers in awe. We’re just treating it for what it is.

And what did you mean when you said “Running Man” was an influence? Overall, or just for this film?

JOSHUA: In general, always. It was one of our favorite movies as a kid.

BENNY: The music is pretty good, too.

JOSHUA: Yeah, the Faltmeyer soundtrack was actually on heavy rotation when we were doing the score. But yeah, the dystopian view of society, the individual trying to break free of conformity, etcetera, etcetera.

That explains a lot about what you guys are jazzed about now with these past two movies. Like, “This is what life is like, this is Arielle’s story, this is fucked up.”

JOSHUA: Well, the crazy thing about this movie is that there was no Connie Nikas. He’s not based on one specific person. He’s basically an amalgamation of like a handful of people that I studied, and very much inspired by the journals that Buddy was keeping when he was in prison, that I was paying Buddy to write while he was locked up.

Was he locked up before …

JOSHUA: Right after “Heaven Knows What” he got locked up for about a year. And we spoke everyday and I visited him and I’d bring him books, and he was talking about how slow time was going, so I was like, “Why don’t you keep a journal? Treat everyday like it is research.” And he was like, “Huh.” So all of the sudden, everything he experienced felt like it had a purpose. And it was helpful for him. And when I was reading these things I was just like, I was really amazed because I had never done real time at all. I’ve done 72 hours in a booking thing, but that’s bullshit. You don’t really get to experience, so I would see these true colors of society through these journals, and I started to understand how someone like Connie would come to be. How someone like Connie would, there was a certain born-again element to people in prison, and there’s like a lot of people find Jesus when they’re locked up, and they have this really warped sense of freedom. In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Abbott was a book that was inspiring, Executioner’s Song was really inspiring, the TV show “Cops,” doing research and meeting people, and a lot of sitting in on tons of arraignments at Hundred Center Street, witch is the courts in New York. And these things just start to bleed into who this person is, and I just started to write a very, and then your imagination turns on, and you’ll imagine this character and imagine in building this character from birth to the beginning of this movie.

That makes me think about the soul in these movies, because these last two have a very humanistic element. Where “Heaven Knows What" is basically a love story, or it’s about a relationship, and this is about brothers. I’m curious, did you intentionally want to create a story that’s about brothers, and the buddy system?

BENNY: It’s weird, it’s like we didn’t realize how powerful the brother … because it was there, and it was the driving force behind a lot of it. But we didn’t go into it thinking, Oh, this is going to be about brotherhood. But that’s just how we take our relationship almost, it’s like, “He’s my brother, that’s how it is.” But you don’t realize the lengths that you’d go to for that, and that just ended up being almost kind of bled into the movie, and we just couldn’t help but increase … the stakes for that were just so much higher. Because we were bringing, subconsciously or consciously, this weight to it, and it’s like, “OK, this is your brother. This is an important thing, you can’t mess around with this.”

JOSHUA: When we were developing the back story, like Benny’s character was from an aborted project that my co-writer and Benny were doing in 2010. And he didn’t have a brother, that character, his original name was Jordan, and then it turned into Nick. And when we were developing Connie, we’re like, “OK, let’s imagine, what if this guy Jordan had a brother? And his brother was the bad apple. And his brother was estranged from him because he didn’t treat him well growing up. And he had to go live with his uncle. And then he ended up getting arrested for stealing cars.”

BENNY: And at one point he was mean to Nick. They weren’t very close and then they became close again. And in a weird way …

JOSHUA: We can relate to that, on our end. It’s very easy for me to relate to that. Because you can see, often, in fraternal relationships, you can see the brother, because it’s your blood, it’s an extension of yourself. Now, when the extension of yourself is somebody who says … I mean, Connie has been discarded as well. But Nick is literally like a fourth-class citizen in society in America. The disabled are literally not even part of society. It’s messed up. But that’s something that he has had to wear his whole life, Connie. So that’s why he doesn’t ever want his brother to go into the system, because then it’s him saying “I’m accepting my place.” And the whole movie is about not accepting your place. But also using your place in society to your advantage at times.

BENNY: But we definitely did a lot of exercises with me and Rob where he would see what it is like, to have a brother in the world with a disability. We would go and I would be in character and he would kind of feel the weight of the exclusion of him from certain conversations. And it would be, “OK, what’s going on here?” And then eventually I would be sitting on the side while he was having conversation and he would try and include me but it wouldn’t work because nobody wanted to talk to Nick.

What … why do you play that character?

BENNY: It was based on a character that Ronnie and I developed in 2010. And then that backstory was brought to the film, but I wasn’t always going to play him. We looked at people with real disabilities, and they’re great people and really interesting. But just some of the action set pieces that we were doing, and the speed in which we would need to work, we realized it was going to get very uncomfortable and we didn’t want to take away their agency to decide what they wanted to do. Because we’d have to really be moving at a speed that was uncomfortable for us, so it would be hard to push them, and we didn’t want to make a movie where it was like, exploiting anybody in that sense, from that point-of-view. We realized that we can’t do that, and the actors were all, we had a lot of people who were auditioning for it who maybe the financiers would have liked, but they were performing. They were playing the character, they weren’t being the character. We asked them questions and we wanted them to respond, not from an actor’s standpoint, but from the character’s point-of-view. I could do that. And everybody I was watching somebody, I was like, “I could do this, they’re not getting it.”

So then it became, OK, I am going to play this role. I really did feel, I feel that he is a part of me, that character. Because whenever you’re acting you’re pulling from yourself, at least I feel. So in this case I really was pulling from, certain parts of my life where I kind of shut off society, or I had certain insecurities in social situations. Where if I was exaggerating them, maybe this would happen. I was just aware of that, and it just became, OK, now I’m like physically stronger and I had to get a little bit bigger for the role just to add this physicality to it, where this guy could actually hurt you. You don’t want to push him too far because he can be, he can take what he wants when he wants it, which is what he wants to do all of the time. So that element of it was really important. And then it was just like, yeah in the scenes where I am playing, I am the character, so I would differentiate what I would be able to feel and what Nick would be able to feel. And knowing that difference and not playing into it, and not playing down into the characters.

You talked about people who are in different places in society. With that, there are very intentional depictions of race in this story, like with Connie and Nick using the black face masks to rob a bank, or how you have an immigrant played by Barkhad Abdi who becomes a scapegoat. For you guys, what were you thinking about, and what were your goals when engaging race?

JOSHUA: So, like I said when you go into prison, the system pits the races against one another in there, and almost like the backstory of Connie is that almost sees the matrix of society. He can kind of see how it functions, in his pared-down state. And also from those prison journals, like literally our jail sequences are direct recreations of things that actually happened to Buddy Duress in real life, and seeing how the mentally disabled and ill are treated in jail, and also the role reversal, that the white man usually comes into jail with his entitlement, and it’s very quickly checked. It’s almost like Nick coming in [to the prison space] and being like, “That’s my TV.” Nick is in another world.

BENNY: He thinks he is at home watching TV.

JOSHUA: From the outside, it’s different. That’s why that white guy is just like, “Leave the TV alone.” And [Nick] is like, “I don’t know you, you’re not my friend.” Because race doesn’t exist to Nick, you know what I mean? Because that’s the reality, that I recently just saw a picture of a little KKK kid, whit kid, who is talking to a black officer in a friendly way, because I’m not saying that Nick, yeah he has developmental disabilities, but he’s stunted.

BENNY: It’s not even present in Nick’s head.

JOSHUA: Race doesn’t exist to Nick. But in those prison journals, there was a guy who was locked up with Buddy who robbed banks disguised as different ethnicities. And that was very interesting to me, it was like, “Oh, ingenious disguise. If you want to not get caught, just go as far from you as you can.” But then while I was writing [“Good Time”], there was this guy in Ohio who was robbing banks specifically with the masks that we used in the movie. The very specific masks. But also similarly there were tons of stories of black men using the same company’s white people masks. And these masks aren’t just generic masks, they’re molded by real people. So, this company in California was asked, “Stop making the masks, people are robbing banks in them.” But they’re so realistic. When I saw that I was like, “Oh, this guy, he definitely got what was coming to him when he got locked up. Because society has a way of being just in its own weird, fucked up way.” But Connie knows, OK, we want to get away with this, and they would have gotten away with this, if he took his hood off, then those two cops who drove by would have just seen it was two white guys, they’re not going to stop them. But because their hoods are up, it was like, “Oh, they could be two black men. Let’s go stop them.” But then they say, “Hey, turn with the hood,” and then Nick takes off. Nick doesn’t understand those things. Connie knows “Don’t worry about it, we’re two white guys, we’re not gonna get in trouble.”

And then later on, it was a very specific idea when we were writing the story, that OK, the security guard that catches them is not only of color, he’s an immigrant. Because immigrants do the jobs that nobody wants to do—who wants to work in the middle of the night in an amusement park?

BENNY: And then you look at his house in the end—

JOSHUA: And he’s the only one who has his life together. It’s a nice apartment! And even Ray walks in and he’s like, “This is a nice fucking place.” So Connie knows, in that moment, as writers, when you’re doing a genre movie, specifically a crime genre movie, plausibility is a big thing. And you want the audience constantly being like, “Yes, that could happen,” because we’re dealing with absurd scenarios so you have to constantly fortify them with reality. So when he sees that the cops are coming to the park, and he turns and looks at this guy on the ground, and he’s like, “let’s change into this outfit,” he knows what two white cops, or two cops in general, are going to think. Racial profiling is going to kick in. And just as the audience does, they just accept it. Because that’s the fucked up part of society. So when he flips that on its head, and all of the sudden they’re like, “Alright, this guy must be fucked up,” and then literally the scene after, and they catch this girl who’s at the park, granted anyone who is walking around the park in the middle of the night is going to be considered guilty, but the added fact that she’s of color, it’s like, “of course she’s guilty,” and the only people being detained are not white. All of the sudden it’s like, we want people to watch this movie and be like, “Well, this is fucked up.” What’s fucked up? Society is fucked up. And Connie, again seeing the matrix, knows how to play it. He knows how to play these things, and that’s why in that moment when Crystal is being arrested, Connie looks at her and he says, “No, that’s not who it was,” but he says, “I don’t know who that is,” and he has that exchange of where she’s looking at him, and she knows that this is fucked up, “I’m literally getting arrested for no reason, right now.” And he’s saying to her, “I’m sorry, I have to do this, because I have something else going on here. I’m in pursuit of my dream.”

BENNY: It’s important to recognize that yes, he sees the matrix, but you can say that he sees society’s prejudices and differentiators based on race or the disabilities, and he takes advantage of that. He takes advantage of the situation. Because he knows that I can use this, and it’s like, maybe you shouldn’t be using that kind of vision for that purpose. He does.

[Joshua shows me different mug shots of men next to pictures of masks]

So this is the same white mask from the company, and this guy robbed the bank like that. This is the guy from Ohio, that’s the actual mask that they used, that’s the exact mask that Rob wears and that’s the guy who did it. This guy robbed a bank like this, that guy robbed a bank with this mask. So we’re literally taking our movie and our plot points from reality. So it’s not like we’re even coming up with these ideas, we’re literally like stealing them from headlines.

BENNY: It’s a pure reflection of what is actually happening.

JOSHUA: Exactly. Especially if you look at what is happening now, it’s actually, I think that the media in purporting these stories and making these stories as such, they’re actually adding gasoline to the fire and they’re pitting races against each other even more so. I think that the racists of this country do need to be called out, you know what I mean? And I think that you could argue, that I don’t think Connie is a racist. I think that he just knows how society functions. He knows that society is racist.

BENNY: Somebody said to us, “Yeah, there’s a difference between a bad guy and a criminal.” That’s interesting, because that moment with Crystal, he knows he is doing something fucked up, but he’s doing it because he knows how to play the situation. He’s a con man, and he’s going to do whatever it takes, and that makes him a bad guy. But I don’t think necessarily in his head he looks at her and thinks, “I’m better than you because I’m white.” But he’s taking advantage of that fact in that moment.

The following article completes our coverage of this year's Pens to Lens Gala in Champaign-Urbana (click here for Part I). For the fifth year in a row, students ranging from kindergarten age to twelfth grade submitted their own scripts to the Pens to Lens Screenwriting Competition. Sixteen of the scripts were selected by directors from Champaign Movie Makers to be produced, while three student-made films were awarded special prizes. The completed slate of short films spawned from this contest, organized by the Champaign Urbana Film Society, were screened this past Saturday in a two-part program at the Virginia Theatre (click on each bolded title and you’ll be directed to the full short).

CHAPTER THREE: "STOP-MOTION MARVELS"

Few films this year, short or otherwise, have brought me to tears as masterfully as third-grader Claire Hartman’s “The Puppy Trials,” an extraordinary stop-motion short directed by Thomas and Becky Nicol. It centers on Big Jim (voiced by Greg Williams), an aging dog who instructs the puppies in an animal shelter on how to be well-behaved when surveyed by potential owners. With delicate nuance and startling emotion, the film celebrates the innate need for companionship shared by humans and canines. Though Thomas had been animating from an early age, it wasn’t until he took a class taught by LAIKA animator Justin Rasch that he was able to graduate from animating at 12 frames per second to 24 frames per second, resulting in movement that is richly textured. The structure of the dogs’ faces prevented them from smiling, allowing the emotion to be conveyed in ways that are more authentically animal-like.

“Structurally we were inspired by Gromit from ‘Wallace and Gromit,’” said Becky. “We wanted Big Jim to express emotion through his eyebrows because the majority of his face is stationary. He resembles a German Shepherd who had been a police dog, and Tom animated him with a limp, indicating that his hip may have been injured when he was on the force.”

Each dog consisted of a wire armature fleshed out with foam soaked in liquid latex that could be molded like clay. Becky handled the needle felting process for each dog’s outward appearance, which took three to four hours on average. Thomas confessed that the puppies looked far less adorable before their eyes were popped into their sockets.

“Becky left the faces for last because of all the detail work they entailed,” said Thomas, “That meant the back end was this fully fleshed-out, cute little puppy butt, and on the front was this horrific black eyeless skull just staring into your soul.”

CHAPTER FOUR: "A CASE OF THE CREEPS"

Speaking of horror, this year’s Pens to Lens offered three first-rate entries in the genre, all of which showcased the versatile work of eleventh grader Parker Evans. Evans wrote the cautionary sci-fi short, “Hu-Man,” a taut little gem that pays clever homage to the HAL robot (famously birthed in Urbana) from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Director Robin Berthier drew inspiration from the dramatic framing in “Mr. Robot” to create a sense of unease, while keeping the face of the film’s formidable robot shrouded in mystery until the very end, a la “The Twilight Zone.” The white walls and glass spectator window of a squash court at the university were ingeniously used as the scientists’ lab, while young actress Sofie Skottene was cast as the androgynous robot, a Star Child for the apocalypse.

Evans was also the third filmmaker this year to earn a prize in the Student Filmmaking Competition for his own directorial debut, “Red Letter Psychics: The Ghost Mask.” He told me that it was purely a coincidence that the apparition hidden behind an expressionless white mask in his film was nearly identical to the one he portrayed in Scott A. Best’s “Daniel,” the scariest and most pleasingly cinematic treasure of Pens to Lens 2017. Director John Isberg pulled off a staggering tribute to “The Shining” by filming an overhead shot of a car via a drone as it drove down the road at night. The shot is repeated at the end with a credit roll identical to the one featured in Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece. Best certainly had that film in mind when he penned this psychological portrait of a schizophrenic man (Kyle A. Thomas) coming to grips with the loss of his brother (David Schiller).

“‘The Shining’ was the film that made me want to go into filmmaking,” said Best. “That movie has been analyzed so much, and yet people are still debating the true meaning of the story. If I can make a film that gets people thinking like that, then I would be happy to do that for the rest of my life.”

After stumbling upon a ragged print of Tom McLoughlin’s 1982 creeper, “One Dark Night,” Isberg decided to lend a similar aesthetic to “Daniel,” complete with cigarette burns. He grew up on horror films from that period (“the more off-kilter, the better”) that specialized in tricking audiences into thinking they were watching something with money behind it. Isberg cited John Carpenter’s decision to shoot “Halloween” in anamorphic as a key example of using budgetary limitations to one’s advantage. Yet apart from the seduction of the style, Isberg was drawn to the script for a deeper reason.

“It’s a film about someone who is overcoming a lot of trauma,” said Isberg. “I teach kids who’ve had to deal with trauma, and I’ve had to overcome trauma in my own life. I actually cut a line in the script because it was too close to my own situation. There are people or events in your life that you build up in your mind until they are everywhere. People who suffer from PTSD sometimes have to be told repeatedly that something isn’t real in order to be brought back into reality.”

CHAPTER FIVE: "HAIL TO THE CHIEF"

If there’s one apparition still haunting the grounds of the city's university, it is most certainly that of Chief Illiniwek, the school’s controversial mascot that was officially banned in 2007, yet still materializes encased in glass at bars on campus a decade later. Rather than educate the masses about Native American history, the mascot served as a commercial product that proved offensive for members of the culture that it was supposedly honoring. By far the most important and incendiary film at this year’s Pens to Lens was Gabriela Ines DeLisle Diaz’s “Standing Rock 19,000, Mascots 0,” which lampoons the hypocritical outrage of Chief fans faced with the death of their tradition. The film was directed by Rachel Rebecca Berry, who collaborated with Diaz last year on “Fast Rodney Who Was On His Way Out,” which I hailed as “a riveting meditation on race, class and other barriers that are continuously preventing us from understanding one another.” The “19,000” in the title of Diaz’s latest film is a reference to the number of protestors who gathered to try and stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, an event very close to the writer’s heart.

“I had considered applying to the UIUC for a long time, until I saw all these Chief Illiniwek shirts being cranked out while the Dakota Access Pipeline protests were occurring,” said Diaz. “I don’t think Obama did as much as he should’ve in protecting the Standing Rock reservation, and this film was spawned from that frustration. For a lot of alumni, the Chief represents nothing but nostalgia for their school and their own memories. I’ve noticed that the younger generations are much more aware and politically correct in their views about these traditions.”

Whereas “Fast Rodney” took the form of near wordless poetry, “Standing Rock” consists primarily of a debate between two female Native American students and a white male peer at a basketball game filled with fans decked out in Chief costumes. The women’s dialogue is loaded with biting retorts such as, “I can’t think of a better way to honor the people who you removed from this land than by pretending to be them,” while Berry plays with the form in ways that reminded me of Spike Lee’s more overtly satirical work. She made the inspired choice of having various minor characters in the crowd and on the court break the fourth wall and deliver their lines straight to the audience, forcing us to confront our implicit role in the conflict. Berry told me that her biggest apprehension about making the film was the fact that she knows many people—including her own mom—who are supportive of the Chief. Her father also happens to be from Cleveland and still cheers on the Cleveland Indians, though he acknowledges that their logo of Chief Wahoo is problematic and needs to change.

“Gabriela said she felt bad after submitting the script because she thought it should’ve been toned down in order to be more persuasive,” said Berry. “But I felt like the script wasn’t trying to persuade people. It was expressing Gabby’s frustration with having these sorts of conversations, so I wanted to give it a sense of realism that devolves into absurdity, because the situation is absurd. One of my favorite shots is the little girl in the Chief makeup who’s shaking her head in disgust. All the adults around her are acting just like little kids. Half of Gabby’s family is from Guam, and she has a lot of anger about the military installations there, as well as the lack of representation for its citizens, since they can’t vote for president. Gabby’s script explores the issue of representation in a way that is so thoughtful and so articulate that you can’t believe it was written by a 17-year-old.”

We all love it when a plan comes together, but sometimes we sacrifice spontaneity and artistic quality when we over-plan. Since the early days of the Netflix Marvel machine, it’s been promised that the heroes would join forces just as cinematic icons like Iron Man and Captain America formed a supergroup in “The Avengers.” And so we get what is essentially the TV version of that concept as the standalone series “Daredevil,” “Jessica Jones,” “Luke Cage” and “Iron Fist” unite to form “The Defenders,” premiering in its entirety this Friday, August 18th on Netflix. While it’s undeniably fun to see at least three of these charismatic characters come together, “The Defenders” suffers from the same bloat that has been plaguing Netflix series of late—everything feels like it’s moving much slower than it needs to in order to stretch out a thin plot to a season length. There’s something happening in the world of Netflix that’s turning into a disease across all television, as I’ve noticed other shows fall apart when it comes to pacing. Not everything can sustain an hour-long episode length or a 13-episode season (although it should be noted this one is just eight). And there’s a difference between deliberate plotting and the wheel-spinning we so often get from Netflix lately. “The Defenders” may end up being Exhibit A in this problem. The heroes don’t even get together until the end of episode three. And, honestly, you could start watching there and not miss too much.

All four of the characters are essentially where we left them. Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox) is keeping his superhero identity of Daredevil under wraps for the most part, choosing to fight crime as an attorney more often than he does as a blind, ass-kicking vigilante. Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter) is a reluctant private eye, but more easily recognized on the street by those hoping she can help them. Luke Cage (Mike Colter) is at Seagate Prison to start the season, but gets out relatively quickly, returning to Harlem to be its savior, hoping to continue his fight to protect the downtrodden and disenfranchised. Iron Fist (Finn Jones) is the most active of the quartet to start, picking up where he left off, in a battle against The Hand with his lover and partner-in-ass-kicking Colleen Wing (Jessica Henwick).

The first two episodes of “The Defenders” slowly move the four characters into each other’s narratives. For example, Jessica gets a case of a missing man that turns out to be much more than it first seems. Luke tries to protect a young man who may be getting wooed into the criminal underworld. Iron Fist continues to seek out The Hand. And all of this happens under the shadow of mysterious happenings in New York City, including a bizarre, unexplainable earthquake. We know that someone named Alexandra (played with steely determination by Sigourney Weaver) is this year’s “Big Bad,” but her identity is mysterious. She appears to be a power player in business and social stature in New York City, but it’s also revealed pretty quickly that she may have a supernatural side as well, and we learn that she’s directly involved with The Hand. Before long, she’s controlling the Black Sky, a resurrected Elektra (Elodie Yung), who has essentially become a memory-less killing machine. Why? What does Alexandra want? And can The Defenders work together to stop her?

“The Defenders” is loaded with familiar faces in an attempt to keep fans of the first four series as happy as possible just from the joy of being reunited with characters they’ve loved in the past. It’s not just the quartet. Foggy Nelson, Misty Knight, Claire Temple, Trish Walker, Malcolm Ducasse, Jeri Hogarth, and even Scott Glenn’s awesome Stick resurface, some of them in key roles. But what’s startling about all of this is that it still doesn’t feel like a real universe has been created. I realized watching “The Defenders” how little depth there is to all of this, and how much seeing these recurring characters didn’t feel like world-building as much as it did fan service. There’s a crucial difference. Part of the problem is that “The Defenders” lacks when it comes to visual language and production design, even when compared to shows like “Daredevil” and “Luke Cage,” which used Hell’s Kitchen and Harlem, respectively, as vibrant backgrounds. There’s a sense here of obligation instead of artistic intent.

“The Defenders” works best as a series of moments. Seeing Weaver and Glenn go at it as long-standing villain and hero has an undeniable energy simply because both performers are so good. There’s a fight scene at the end of episode three that’s so well-staged that it reminds you how half-asleep you’ve been for the previous three hours. However, it’s easy to believe there will be more like it in the back half of the season and fans will forget about the slow set-up. There are character beats that work too, particularly in the way Cage and Jones mock Iron Fist’s self-seriousness and inexperience. Colter and Ritter are undeniably charismatic. And Cox is good as the reticent Daredevil, the de facto leader of this group, if only because he’s the only Defender to have two seasons of background (and a lot of his supporting cast returns).

In the end, “The Defenders” ticks enough boxes that fans will likely overlook its flaws. In other words, it does pretty much what it needed to do to keep the Netflix Marvel Universe humming along to the next seasons of “Jessica Jones” and “Luke Cage.” It’s a bridge more than an artistic accomplishment in its own right. If that’s enough for you, that’s fine, but with all the build-up and all the hype for this superhero supergroup, no one would blame you for expecting a little more.

The following article begins our two-part coverage of this year's Pens to Lens Gala in Champaign-Urbana. For the fifth year in a row, students ranging from kindergarten age to twelfth grade submitted their own scripts to the Pens to Lens Screenwriting Competition. Sixteen of the scripts were selected by directors from Champaign Movie Makers to be produced, while three student-made films were awarded special prizes. The completed slate of short films spawned from this contest, organized by the Champaign Urbana Film Society, were screened this past Saturday in a two-part program at the Virginia Theatre (click on each bolded title and you’ll be directed to the full short).

CHAPTER ONE: "MAKE 'EM LAUGH"

There was an amusing moment during Ebertfest 2006 where Roger Ebert singled out a movie that had recently been sent to him for consideration. It was “The University of Illinois Vs. A Mummy,” a microbudget horror comedy directed by Champaign-Urbana’s own Chris Lukeman and shot at the critic’s alma mater. “I’m sure this is going to be a very interesting film,” Ebert told the audience. Well, as someone who viewed all 89 minutes of the picture, I can report that it is not only interesting but highly entertaining, infused with the creative exuberance and ingenuity that has characterized the work of Champaign’s tight-knit filmmaking community. One of the greatest aspects about the city’s annual Pens to Lens Gala is how it demonstrates to young people that their dreams can become a tangible reality, and that their thoughts about life can prove to delight and provoke audiences of all ages.

Though he was appearing later that evening in the closing night performance of Marjorie Prime at the city’s historic Station Theatre, actor Gary Ambler was in attendance to view his splendidly kooky performance in DJ Wang’s “The Double Machine,” where he portrayed a professor who accidentally clones himself. The film is bookended with musical numbers reminiscent of co-director Chris Lukeman’s memorable song performed by naively chipper freshmen in his “Mummy” feature. Gala co-host Cara Maurizi composed the music for Wang’s lyrics, and her work was praised by the young scribe, who insisted that he couldn’t get the tune out of his head. Chris and co-director Andrew Gleason noted that this was high praise, considering that Wang is a musical prodigy.

“He couldn’t make it to set because he was literally playing Carnegie Hall that week,” Chris said. “He’s in second grade.”

Anne Lukeman (Chris’ wife) directed the gala’s curtain-raiser, Ella Kirwan’s “Super Amazing Man Vs. Dr. Evil,” a superhero parody chockfull of endearingly silly gags. My favorite is one that I’ll dub a “Lukemanism,” since it reminded me of the moment in “Mummy” where the hero hollers, “Wait a minute!”, prompting the other characters to pause awkwardly for a full minute. In Anne’s film, a dotty sidekick (Lindsey Gates-Markel) pulls a ludicrous number of items from her purse while searching for keys.

“I love jokes that start out funny, become unfunny and then wrap around to being funny again,” said Anne. “That moment was on the line of being too much, but when Chris watched it, he said, ‘I will fight for that joke until my dying breath.’”

Also earning big laughs was Luca Villaseñor’s “The Luchador,” in which director Andrew Stengele constructed a remarkably convincing interrogation room out of styrofoam, and pulled off a nifty shot where the lead actor is tripled within the same frame. Yet perhaps the biggest crowd-pleaser of all was Aidan Henry’s “The 9th Annual Community Opposite Day,” an uproarious ode to the anarchy of youth. Former WCW/WWE pro-wrestler Bishop Stevens brought enormous charisma to the role of a man who relishes moving through his daily routine in reverse, from unmaking his bed to driving backwards down the street. I was surprised when Stevens turns on the TV, and Bill Kurtis appears, portraying his inimitable self.

“I had been working in Chicago with Kurtis Productions, which does a lot of documentary programs like ‘American Greed’ and ‘Cold Case Files,’” said director Charlie Kessler. “Bill was in the office a lot and I had spoken to him before. I sent his assistant an e-mail where I explained what Pens to Lens is and asked if Bill would be interested in delivering a line of dialogue in my film. She told me that he’d love to do it, and that they would shoot his scene and send it to me. He did two takes, and they were both completely different.”

With every snap zoom and quick cut, Kessler’s visual style mirrors the enthusiasm of his leading man, whose commitment to spirited slapstick rivals that of Dwayne Johnson, a fellow wrestler-turned-performer Stevens had previously trained alongside in Memphis.

“This film was the most fun thing I’ve ever done,” said Stevens. “Chaplin is regarded as one of the greatest actors because he could draw in the audience solely with his face. I had only a few lines in the script, and it was cool to prove that I could carry a whole film with my expressions.”

CHAPTER TWO: "THE STUFF OF FANTASY"

Max Libman’s adorable live-action farce, “Adventures of Filmmaking,” was one of two winners in the Student Filmmaking Competition, the other being DJ Wang’s equally funny animated fantasy, “The Power of Coffee” (Rowan Fisher’s celestial LEGO odyssey, “A Space Trip,” received an honorable mention). Demonic stuffed animals were brought to life through puppetry in Emily Ritter’s “Stuffed,” directed by Drew Brown and Wendy Ball, which included a stuffed poop emoji that thankfully received no lines of dialogue. Rosalie Anderson’s “The Perfect Friend,” directed by Emily Polk, visualized a medieval fantasy with striking compositions and narration from Polk’s husband, Thomas (sounding an awful lot like Gonzo).

As a showcase for superb acting, Katarina Blakeslee’s “Writer’s Block” is an obvious standout, with its sublime performance by Champaign theatre vet Barbara Evans (who was performing in Marjorie Prime with her husband, Gary Ambler, on Saturday). Co-directors Andrew Gleason and Thomas Nicol marveled at Evans’ portrayal of a beloved author addressing the audience at a reading of her latest, long-awaited book. She voices her belief in the importance of imagination with an urgency that is both subdued and arresting.

“I was excited at how she could command attention in the role,” said Andrew. “She really understands how to take control of a close-up through the tiny things that she does with her eyes.”

A masterstroke of the filmmakers is how they cast their extras according to the stuffed animals strewn around Evans’ bed, where we later see her chatting with her grandkids, suggesting that the book reading was all in her mind. Blakeslee deserves kudos for penning a script that rewards multiple viewings with its complexity.

Tales of alienation and adolescent embarrassment naturally make their way into Pens to Lens, and there were two animated shorts that tackled these themes with charming results. Elise Colgrove’s “Flowerboy,” directed by Dan Drake, spun a heartfelt yarn about a boy with a flower inexplicably growing where his left eye should be. Echoing Richard Dreyfuss’ dry wit in “Stand by Me,” narrator Matt Shivers notes that the flower hindered nothing but the boy’s “ability to make friends…and his depth perception.” Director Michael Bach nailed the giddy nonchalance of Henry DeVivo’s “The Werebanana,” where a kid transforms into a banana when the crescent moon rises. As a clock counts down toward self-destruction, it pauses to shrug, “Aw, what the heck?”, before eliminating several seconds just to up the tension.

Some of the shorts this year played like the enticing teaser for a feature-length narrative, such as Bridget Spillman’s “Gnarled Alliance: A Tale of Brothers,” directed Thomas Polk, which sets up an epic sibling rivalry. Director Jon Lecouris drenched Robert Mercer’s thriller, “Colibri,” in a brooding atmosphere, complete with slick camerawork and a moody “Drive”-esque score, as its story concludes on a cliffhanger. I, for one, am immensely eager to see a feature made from Madeline De Coste’s “I Know You,” a vignette about two secret wonder women who meet in an elevator, and gradually realize they are each other’s arch-nemesis. Co-directors Becky Nicol and Nadine Gleason came up with a killer comic beat where the women briefly put their argument on hiatus in order to reapply their masks.

“In all the superhero movies that are out right now, you see women kicking butt, but you rarely see what they do as everyday people,” said Nadine (wife of Andrew). “I really liked how Madeline’s script took us behind the scenes and into the lives of these strong women.”

Check back tomorrow for Part II of our Pens to Lens 2017 coverage, which will feature impressive stop-motion animation, Kubrickian horror and a provocative satire about Native American mascots.

While it is about one specific romantic relationship, South Korean film “Our Love Story” is a lesbian romance drama with universal aspects. The movie's main strength comes from its close, intimate observation on the development of its two main characters’ relationship. There are several touching moments as they feel happiness together, but there are also some bitter moments as their relationship gradually becomes strained later. We come to reflect on why romantic relationships usually require a lot more than mutual attraction.

The first half of the film is mainly told via the viewpoint of Yoon-joo (Lee Sang-hee), an art college student preparing for the exhibition project for graduation along with her schoolmates. She and her schoolmates are going to present their respective works under the guidance of their adviser professor, and Yoon-joo is planning to make her work from various metallic junks to be obtained from a nearby junkyard.

As she looks for anything useful at the junkyard, a young woman around her age comes to the junkyard, and Yoon-joo later encounters her again at a convenience store. When that young woman has a small trouble with buying a pack of cigarette, Yoon-joo gives her a little help, and we soon see them smoking together outside the convenient store.

While she turns out to be younger than Yoon-joo, Ji-soo (Ryoo Seon-yeong) looks more assured and confident compared to Yoon-joo, and she seems to sense something from her new acquaintance. When she suggests that Yoon-joo should drop by a bar where she works, Yoon-joo seems reluctant, but she eventually goes there along with her two colleagues during one evening, though that small evening drinking meeting does not end well to her dismay.

Yoon-joo finds herself more attracted to Ji-soo, but she is still not so sure about what she wants. Unlike her ebullient roommate who is quite forthright about the ongoing relationship with her current boyfriend, she usually keeps her feelings to herself, but her doubt and hesitation feel palpable to us as we look at her shy, docile face.

As a more sexually experienced woman, Ji-soo exactly knows what she wants and, perhaps, what Yoon-joo wants. Not long after Yoon-joo goes back to her residence for sleep, she calls and invites Yoon-joo to another drinking meeting. As they drink wine together at Ji-soo’s residence, they get to know a bit more about each other, and then they soon find themselves lying together on Ji-soo’s bed.

In my opinion, the following moment between them has an important lesson to be learned by any teenagers regardless of their sexuality. When Ji-soo approaches to Yoon-joo first via her soft kiss, Yoon-joo willingly responds to that, but then she changes her mind in the middle of their foreplay, and Ji-soo accepts that without any complaint. Although there is nothing gaudy or sensational in the film, it was rated “18” just because of its subject when it was released in South Korea in last year, a big disservice to adolescent audiences who might have benefited from the film.

Anyway, Yoon-joo and Ji-soo eventually come to have their first sexual moment under their mutual consent the following morning, and I admire what the director/writer Lee Hyeon-joo and her two performers achieve here. The sex scene in the movie is tastefully and realistically handled with considerable warmth and sensitivity, and we often feel like an unseen observer in the room as the handheld camera constantly sticks close to their carnal progress. After the Q&A session followed by a screening I attended during one Saturday evening of November 2016, I told Lee how much I was impressed by this realistic scene, and I also pointed out to her that some of the sounds heard during this scene actually felt like the noises being made by her cinematographer Son Jin-yong, who did a terrific job of capturing the characters’ emotional interactions well on the screen. Lee replied to me that my impression might be correct at least partially, and I still do not know whether it was a joke or not.

After their first sex, Yoon-joo and Ji-soo becomes closer to each other, and Yoon-jo begins to consider living together as a couple, but then they come to face each own matters of reality. Ji-soo soon moves back to her family home in Inchon, and she lives again with her Christian widower father, who has no idea on his daughter’s sex life and is still hoping that she will marry some good guy someday. At one point, she has a date with a guy introduced via one of her father’s acquaintances just because her father wants that, and that reminds me of my perfunctory dates with a number of young women recommended by my mother, who is still in denial even after I came out of the closet in last September.

In case of Yoon-joo, she feels like being drifted apart from Ji-soo after she goes back to Inchon. Although they continue to meet each other from time to time, Yoon-joo is disappointed and frustrated especially when Ji-soo hides their relationship from her father. To make matters worse, she also goes nowhere in her art project, and that adds more agony and frustration to her increasingly complicated life.

In its unadorned, restrained storytelling approach, the movie keeps its main characters’ emotional matters grounded in reality, and there are numerous realistic details to notice in the film. I especially appreciated the myriad details shown from Yoon-joo and her colleagues’ workshop, and Lee later told me about how she tried to make that place look authentic with several artworks specially prepared for her movie. The workshop in the film does look like a real place where aspiring young artists like Yoon-joo would spend many hours, and other places and locations shown in the movie are also realistic as mundane parts of our heroines’ ongoing daily life.

The movie is supported a lot by the undeniable chemistry between its two lead performers. Lee Sang-hee is poignant as her character tentatively enters her uncharted emotional territories, and she and Ryoo Seon-yeong generate subtle emotional dynamics between their characters. Thanks to their nuanced performances, we always can sense their characters’ thoughts and feelings even when they do not say much, and that is why it is sad to watch when Yoon-joo and Ji-soo come to see how much they become distant to each other.

As this movie is essentially Lee and Ryoo’s show, the supporting performers surrounding them are also believable in their respective roles. As Yoon-joo’s former schoolmate, Park Keun-rok has one amusing scene where he functions as a close straight male friend to listen to her, and Lim Sung-mi has a quiet but tense moment when her supposedly open-minded character shows her silent anger and disgust to Yoon-joo. While briefly appearing in only one scene, Lee Tae-ri ably suggests a history between her character and Ji-soo, and we come to wonder what happened between them before Ji-soo meets Yoon-joo.

Because it was released in South Korea in the same year, “Our Love Story” is inevitably compared with Park Chan-wook’s “The Handmaiden” (2016), though they are different from each other as much as apples and oranges despite a common subject. While the latter is a lavish, steamy, and kinky erotic period thriller, the former is a modest and earnest contemporary romance drama. Still, both of them distinguish themselves as two of the most notable South Korean films in last year.

By the way, last year was quite an interesting year for me and other South Korean audiences. Besides “Our Love Story” and “The Handmaiden”, we got “Snow Path” (2015), “Steel Flower” (2015), “The World of Us” (2016), “The Truth Beneath” (2016), “The Queen of Crime” (2016), “Queen of Walking” (2016), “Worst Woman” (2016), “The Bacchus Lady” (2016). All of these good films gave us strong female characters to remember while bringing some fresh air into South Korean film industry. I am not entirely sure whether this is an emerging new trend or not, but I really hope that I and other South Korean audiences will be treated with more films like them.